Our story

Before this, I sold light bulbs to people who didn’t want them. I did night shifts in a cold-storage chicken warehouse, worked in a call centre, and never kept a retail job longer than three months.

I got a 97.95 ATAR and started biomedical science because it was the safe path, then dropped out after a year. Terence and I tried crypto, dropshipping and Amazon FBA. None of it worked. At 19 I lost $15,000 overnight on crypto and cried myself to sleep. It wasn’t really about the money. It was that I’d been chasing quick money with no skills and no direction.

Then I found a video about Airbnb arbitrage in America. I rang Terence that night and asked him, “What if we tried this in Melbourne?” He said, “I’m down, let’s do it.”

We sat in a co-working space for two or three weeks dialling agents back to back, and landed our first property about three weeks in. Then we got a lot wrong. Thousands overspent on furniture. Three weeks to fit it out, so three weeks of rent burned. A faulty washing machine that flooded the apartment, and carpets we fixed ourselves. Prices we set wrong.

“We got our first booking within an hour of listing... The guest paid us $625. We took home $521... and that was only for two nights. Our weekly rent for the place was $480.”

I was at the cinema watching Barbie that night while more bookings came in. Terence and I were texting each other, “Holy crap, we’re actually getting bookings.” We went all in after that.

It hasn’t all been smooth. At about five properties we took a guest off the platform who seemed a bit dodgy but was paying decent money. He set off the sprinklers and flooded the apartment, the units next door and below, and the building’s gym. We sat on five properties for five months after that, not sure it was worth it. Then we tightened how we screen guests and check ID, and started signing leases again.

Stan has been Terence’s best friend for years. He wanted to know what we were doing, Terence taught him, and he started alongside us at three or four properties. Then friends of friends asked for help. Once I started posting videos, so did a lot of people I’d never met.

These days we have an operations manager, a warehouse, our own cleaning team and an errand runner, so we’re completely hands-off the day-to-day. We spend very little time inside the Airbnb side of things now.

Jordan